“Syme was not only dead, he was abolished, an unperson.”

In George Orwell’s 1984, those who stand against Big Brother are rounded up by the government and “vanished.” That person then becomes an “unperson” — the opposite of persondom in the eyes of the world.

In the famous set of photos that we have appropriated for our banner, Colonel Nikolai Yezhov, a high-ranking officer in the Soviet secret police NKVD, fell out of favor with Josef Stalin and was promptly removed from all official photos. The only thing that makes this photo unusual is that the original photo with Yezhov in it still remains.

(In a karmic turn, Yezhov, as a member of the secret police, had gained great acclaim in the Party for previous purges of other high-ranking Soviet officials, which promptly put him out of favor with Stalin himself.)